{"id":45,"date":"2008-04-11T14:23:25","date_gmt":"2008-04-11T14:23:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/daily-pope-question-no-1.html"},"modified":"2008-04-11T14:23:25","modified_gmt":"2008-04-11T14:23:25","slug":"daily-pope-question-no-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/daily-pope-question-no-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Daily Pope Question No. 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

A papal visit like next week’s trip to the U.S. by Benedict XVI is an opportunity not only to check out the current occupant of the Chair of St. Peter, but also to learn more about the 2,000-year history of the papacy and the Catholic Church. To help us do this, author Christopher Bellitto, an assistant professor of history at Kean University and one of the foremost authorities on church lore, and his publisher, Paulist Press, have agreed to let us cite 10 examples–one each for the next 10 days–from his new book, “101 Questions on Popes and the Papacy.” (Click here<\/a> for more information on the book.)
\nSo let’s start with the basics: No. 1: “Was Peter the first pope?”<\/p>\n


\nYes, but not in the way modern readers might think. Jesus selected Peter from among his twelve disciples and set him apart in a leadership position that, over the course of time, came to be called \u201cpope,\u201d with the bureaucracy behind him eventually being called \u201cthe papacy.\u201d Peter was a \u201cfirst\u201d of some kind, a person set apart from the others. He is the man tradition says led the Christian community in the city of Rome\u2014the center of the Roman Empire\u2014and was martyred there, probably around the year 64 in a wave of persecutions under the emperor Nero. But Peter did not wear a white cassock, celebrate Mass at St. Peter\u2019s Basilica, run the Vatican, write encyclicals, or name cardinals.
\nBecause this is a key question for history and theology, we must spend some time with the scriptural precedents for saying that Peter was the first pope. These passages will be debated, interpreted and reinterpreted, and used as foundations and criticism during much of the church\u2019s life that followed Jesus and Peter. Some will say these passages point to Peter as \u201cthe first pope\u201d\u2014if only in a very rudimentary way\u2014and others will say these passages point to Peter as a kind of \u201cfirst among equals,\u201d just a spokesman, a shared decision maker, or a presider among others.
\nMatthew 16:18-19 provides the absolutely essential moment. These verses follow a scene where Jesus asks his followers who people say he is. Some say John the Baptist or prophets like Elijah or Jeremiah. Jesus presses his closest disciples to answer the question. Peter responds that Jesus is, indeed, the Messiah and the Son of God. Jesus praises Peter and then says: \u201cAnd I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.\u201d So important are these words that a condensed form of these two verses in Latin is inscribed in huge letters in the dome above the high altar in St. Peter\u2019s Basilica.
\nThe other critical passage that sets Peter apart is John 21:15-17. Here, the resurrected Jesus takes Peter aside and asks him three times if Peter loves him \u2014this is after Peter denied knowing Jesus three times on the night during Holy Week now called Holy (or Maundy) Thursday. Three times Peter says yes, and Jesus tells him to feed his sheep and lambs. As this gospel paints the scene, Peter and Jesus are physically standing apart from the others. Jesus gives this special charge to Peter directly and individually.
\nSimilarly, in the scenes in Acts of the Apostles right after Pentecost (see, for instance, chapters 2-4), Peter is playing a leading role and is often the first to speak up, to proclaim Jesus\u2019 resurrection, and to say that miracles are taking place in Jesus\u2019 name and not by human authority. The other disciples are present\u2014preaching, teaching, and performing miracles\u2014but Peter seems to have taken the lead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A papal visit like next week’s trip to the U.S. by Benedict XVI is an opportunity not only to check out the current occupant of the Chair of St. Peter, but also to learn more about the 2,000-year history of the papacy and the Catholic Church. To help us do this, author Christopher Bellitto, an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nDaily Pope Question No. 1 - Benedictions: The Pope in America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/daily-pope-question-no-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Daily Pope Question No. 1 - Benedictions: The Pope in America\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A papal visit like next week’s trip to the U.S. by Benedict XVI is an opportunity not only to check out the current occupant of the Chair of St. Peter, but also to learn more about the 2,000-year history of the papacy and the Catholic Church. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}